


All The Other Working Parts

by TeaCub90



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Affection, Canon Divergence, Families of Choice, Female John Watson, Gen, Genderswap, Hurt/Comfort, John is Joanna, Love, Parenthood, Queerplatonic Relationships, past bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 07:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19080235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaCub90/pseuds/TeaCub90
Summary: He turns his attention from his microscope to look at her, framed in the kitchen doorway: stripy jumper, longer hair with silver streaks and sharp endings, slight bags beneath her eyes from motherhood and crime-solving and keeping Sherlock in one piece, stoic and brilliant and lovely as ever.Or: Rosie takes Sherlock by surprise.





	All The Other Working Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing like a little genderswap/canon divergence on a Monday, no? Although based against the general backdrop of Series 4, there are a few significant differences, although the general warning for spoilers with particular reference to past canonical violence and character death still applies, plus a fair bit of swearing. Unbeta'ed, so all mistakes are mine and I welcome feedback. As ever, I don't own Sherlock. 
> 
> The title is inspired by Biffy Clyro.

* * *

 

The moment Rosie says it, there’s absolutely _nothing_ to prepare him for it. That’s the thing about children, Sherlock considers – and has explained to just about everyone around him; Jon, Lestrade and probably the whole of Scotland Yard. They come out with the unexpected, the unplanned-for, the honest. The gifts that grown-ups lack. They make very good and truthful witnesses to events. Some of the crimes that Sherlock has been able to crack has been due to the ears of a child, the eyes of a child; the soft pad of someone who should have been in bed, peering through cracks in walls, through doors, seeing things they’re not supposed to see.

He also never expected to become a godfather himself, so. There’s _that._

It’s a usual sort of quiet Saturday: no shift at the clinic for Jon, no cases for him, Rosie home from nursery and last night’s takeaway for lunch. Jon, for her part, is thankful for these times, rare as they are, Sherlock knows this much; an extra pair of hands, time away from the outside world. Sleep is a far more precious thing these days, for both of them.

Rosie starts calling for her mother at around two o’clock in the afternoon, having gone down for a nap after lunch. Two years old and already she has the command of her mother in her tone, Sherlock thinks, of Captain Joanna ‘Jon’ Watson, the captain herself immediately abandoning her laptop to answer the call. Putting down his phone, Sherlock follows at a more sedate pace, waits at the bottom of the stairs; a moment later and Rosie herself is descending, one step at a time, holding onto the banister and counting herself down sleepily but determinedly – ‘oooooonnnnne, twwwooooo, threeeeeeeeee…’ When she sees him, she beams; reaches out.

‘Sha-Sha!’

‘Good afternoon, Rosie,’ he greets her politely, before plucking her up into his arms and raising her above his head for a lift – never difficult, despite her growth and just because it pleases him greatly to hear her giggle, like the trickle of a tap after days in the desert. Jon, tired but constant, shuffles down to join them, a faint smile on her mouth to watch them.

And _that’s_ when Rosie says it, beaming down at Sherlock:

‘I _like_ you!’

She gurgles it through a broad grin that crinkles her face – her ‘like’ sounds more like ‘yike’ and lends it extra emphasis but then she’s only two and her vocabulary is still developing – and yet there’s no mistaking it, the sound of it, spoken in high, jaunty tones that sound just like the rise and fall of her mother’s laugh.

_I like you._

Sherlock blinks. The world goes quiet.

‘Sherlock.’ Jon’s voice is exceedingly calm, a sudden, sharp tap in the cotton-wool that’s settled over Sherlock’s brain; _please lower my daughter from where you currently have her dangling in mid-air._ Sherlock can feel the weight of her gaze on him, the way that she heard it too; blinks again, blinks fast, blinks his hard-drive back into gear and lowers Rosie to his chest, kisses her head, her cheek; honestly can’t think of what else to do.  

Next to him, Jon tips her head to the side, something in her face concerned now. ‘Sherlock?’

‘Um…’ he munches on his words, of which there are suddenly too many, or perhaps not enough. Rosie, apparently sensing his confusion, or perhaps a potential need for comfort, places her head on his shoulder.

‘Aaaaaah,’ she reassures softly, patting it better. Trusting.

Sherlock meets Jon’s eyes over her head; she’s watching him with wide, all-too-innocent eyes and a mouth that draws her opinions tight. Jealousy, perhaps, that _her_ daughter has said that to _him?_ No – not that: there’s a grin under those lips that she can’t quite bite back, isn’t even trying. How utterly _wonderful_ that she finds his surprise so incredibly amusing.

Then she raises her eyebrows, very significantly at him, makes that soft-but-not-really cough in the back of her throat, the slightest indication of her head that no-one but Sherlock would be able to catch. _Do something, you idiot._

‘I. Like you too, Rosie,’ Sherlock manages, finally, sincerely (been sincere since the moment she was born in the back of Marcus’ car, all body-limbs and bodily fluids and a pair of his best trousers ruined; a clammy, small, squalling thing, wrapped up in his jacket that he found himself staring at a second too long before suddenly remembering to hand her over to Jon, his eyes falling on the umbilical cord, wondering two things: a) if he could keep it for study and b) if this was how archaeologists felt when they unearthed something life-changing, remarkable, beautiful).

‘Yeeee-heah-heah!’ Rosie pats his chest then, satisfied and _really rather quite hard –_ her mother’s punch, to be sure and Sherlock lowers her to the floor, lets himself be dragged into the living room with a command of ‘Sha-Sha, come too.’

They wind up having a tea-party by the fireplace, with the skull and the stuffed bee as their fellow guests. Rosie wants to invite the cow-skull over as well, has a tantrum when she’s told no, but Sherlock finds his voice, his breath to explain as calmly as he can that the Mr. Cow-skull prefers his own company and doesn’t mind merely watching; pacifies Rosie by lifting her up to raise a cup to his lips, so he won’t feel left out at least. Then he has to do it again and again, three more times, a one-man escalator for his goddaughter.

‘He thirsty,’ Rosie explains, patting the cow-skull not-so-tenderly. _‘Yooooou_ thirsty too, Sha-Sha,’ and she makes Sherlock have a sip as well, raises the slightly battered cup to his mouth.

‘Mmm, lovely tea.’ He kisses the cheek of his hostess, just as Mummy and Mycroft always taught him; pretends to eat her fingers with the excuse that he thought they were biscuits, just to make her laugh.

He can still feel Jon’s eyes on his back.

*

It bounces around Sherlock’s head all afternoon _– I like you –_ the words shaping Rosie’s smile, the high flit of her voice – echoing in his Mind Palace, a constant tune for every corridor he walks down. Not deafening; she will never be silenced and he will never allow it, but still, he can’t put it away. He _tries_ – tries neatly storing the words, the three little words, into the wing of his Mind Palace that’s devoted entirely to Rosamund ‘Rosie’ Watson, but he cannot close the door; it keeps bursting open, refuses to be locked. Even after Rosie goes to bed that evening, it refuses to be locked.

‘She meant it, you know.’

Jon slips into his orbit, her voice softly knowing – he knows her tread, has known it for years, hears the creaks in the way she favours her less-cruel leg, the one unaffected by psychosomatic pain (occasional, these days; not frequent, but _there)._ He can feel the strength of her stare behind him; not _angry,_ not by any means, just…something else.

He turns his attention from his microscope to look at her, framed in the kitchen doorway: stripy jumper, longer hair with silver streaks and sharp endings, slight bags beneath her eyes from motherhood and crime-solving and keeping Sherlock in one piece, stoic and brilliant and lovely as ever. She smirks a little, slips inside, shuts the door behind her and wanders over to the table, arms folded as she stares at him on his stool.

‘She did,’ she shrugs again, mouth turning upwards on one side, careful. ‘She _loves_ you, Sherlock, she’s…completely smitten with you.’ She smiles and that’s the odd thing; right at this moment, despite her exhaustion, she looks so _happy._

Sherlock parses that, purses his lips, stares at his results, scattered on paper across the table. His test-tubes and Bunsen-burner that he usually keeps locked away, triple-padlocked on the high shelves, only for when Rosie isn’t around. The body-parts, or rather the lack of them, that now exist in a separate fridge downstairs in 221C – with an expanding household, adaptations needed to be made and Mycroft was emotionally blackmailed by Mummy into paying for the improvements. The tables and furniture with round edges, all brought specifically to avoid accidents.

‘What will you tell her,’ he asks the far wall, ‘when she wants to know how her father died?’

It’s a reminder to her as much as himself; that one day, Rosie, who throws mashed carrots at the walls, who turns the bathroom into Niagara Falls, who fits _just right_ into the crook of Sherlock’s arms, will be a woman, asking questions, seeking answers. That one day, she may not want Sherlock’s protection at all, no matter how willing he is to give it.

He can sense Jon’s shrug, suitably careless; she leans on the table next to him with much less concern than she should have, given the circumstances. Still calm, still staring.

‘The truth,’ she tells him, simply. ‘That he died saving a good man’s life.’

Sherlock grips the table, wills her to take this seriously. ‘And when she finds out that man was me?’ He closes his eyes; unable to bear it, the reality of Rosie’s rejection one day, because he’d made a vow, he’d brought Marcus home again with the promise of security that he’d failed to deliver, because Marcus had, however unexpectedly, taken a bullet for him.

It would be the natural assumption _to_ make.

Jon though, just shakes her head, elbows resting on his notes. ‘She’s half-him, Sherlock. And he was a stubborn sod who made his own decisions. He was,’ she shrugs, unapologetic in the face of Sherlock’s stunned exhale, holds his gaze, holds it fast. ‘He just decided to make it count for something, in the end.’

She lays a hand carefully on the back of his neck, rubbing his curls, as if trying to soothe a wounded animal. Sherlock swallows, with an audible click that Jon can probably feel beneath her hand; remembers blue shades cast over Marcus’ face as he slipped away in Jon’s arms that night at the aquarium. The way Jon pushed him away when he reached out for her – _don’t you dare, you made a vow –_ only to reach out seconds later to pull him back, falling apart against his chest, half-apologies and half-abuse, cursing blue murder at him, cursing blue murder at Marcus, _no I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair, you bastards, you fucking, fucking, **fucking** bastards, why didn’t you wait for me... _

It was only when she had turned to aim a kick at her husband’s corpse, sprawled out by their feet, that Sherlock had pulled her away and back to him, hands on her neck, her arm, holding her up. Wouldn’t say it was okay, because it wasn’t and genuinely could not think of anything else to say; could only watch over her head as Marcus was bagged up and taken away, Jon shaking beneath his palms.

And yet, here they are.

‘She _won’t_ hate you,’ Jon promises it as though it’s a foregone conclusion, a guarantee. ‘She might – I can’t pretend she won’t struggle to understand, but we’ll talk her through it. Show her Marcus’s DVD, maybe, if we think she can handle it.’

She nods; Sherlock makes a mental note of that disc, still safely stashed in the back of a drawer, Marcus’ twinkling acceptance of a world without him and his affectionate instructions towards them, _my Baker Street duo._

‘We’ll explain the whole case to her, if we have to,’ Jon adds, her tone is calm, constant, reassuring, ‘We’ve even got people who were there that night. If she needs to talk to them; if she wants to find out more, maybe have a chat with either your brother, or Greg, or anyone else...then that’s what we’ll do.’ She runs her palm down his back, a warm trail – in the next instance, she sighs, her shoulders suddenly dropping.

‘Anyway, Marcus and I weren’t…just.’ She stops herself, grimacing, takes a moment, visibly gathering her thoughts together.

‘Look,’ she continues finally, a determination to be decisive seeping into her tone. ‘There’s a lot of stuff for her to know and there will be, in the future. Hm? Just…focus on _now_ with me, Sherlock. Just… help me get through the nights and the nappy-changes. I…’ She clears her throat, glances away, ‘…need you.’

She coughs, perhaps to shake herself out of the admission, a sudden loss of sureness, reaches up instead to push Sherlock’s hair back on one side, running her palm through his curls as if to ground herself, long and languorous. Sherlock, gently captured by her, can’t find the right words because he’s too stuck on the _we,_ on this apparent premise of Jon’s that he’ll be allowed to play a part in Rosie’s life for years to come. _I need you:_ three words he never fails to respond to and something which Jon, much to her own embarrassment, clearly recognises.

And yet. And _yet._

‘I’m not… _replacing_ him, am I?’ He lets the question tumble slowly out of a deserted corridor in the Mind Palace that he’s paced far too many times, listening to his footprints echo off the walls, the tiles, mulling over the question – but to his surprise, Jon just laughs.

‘What? With his picture up in the other room?’ She raises an incredulous eyebrow, nods through the kitchen doorway towards the lounge, where Marcus’ photo sits in pride of place above the mantlepiece, grinning out beside the skull. ‘With the way you talk about him all the time? Telling Rosie all about her Brave Daddy, the Super-Spy? Yeah, I heard that,’ she grins, nudging him as he blinks; caught, embarrassed, _ah_ – before swinging her arms around his shoulders, leaning against him from behind, a warm weight against his back. ‘You love her.’

‘Of course I do,’ Sherlock snaps, because he does; he _felt_ it, swelling up right inside him, pressing right up against his bones, the second she emerged from Jon's womb right into his hands, making him by default the very first person to hold the human miracle that is Rosie Watson. After Marcus died, he spent nights trawling around the flat, not sleeping while Jon and Rosie rested upstairs, guarding the windows, the doors, anywhere someone hostile with scores to settle could possibly get in, pose a threat and unable to escape the image of Marcus breathing his last breath at his feet. Jon, after all so recently-widowed, adjusting to single-parenthood and trying to get her head around the fact that Marcus had lost his fight for a regular life after so long running from his irregular one – even after she gave him her own name to protect him – hadn’t noticed for about three days.

When she _did_ discover him, slumped against the wall at the top of the stairs, she promptly pulled him up by the collar and he had tensed, fully expecting her to slap him, punch him; to strike home where the bullet had failed to do so. Instead, she had simply shaken him, forceful but brief – ‘Marcus didn’t die for you to do this to yourself, you prick,’ (her grief and shock cracked by something else underneath; anger, or possibly concern) – and marched him off to bed.

And she and Rosie had stayed.

‘Well, there you are, then,’ Jon murmurs now, calm against his back, holding him still as though she can hold him together; breathes against his hair, noses at his ear. ‘Simple as. You’re all ours.’

The warm hum of her voice tickles him as she leans forward to press a single, long kiss to his curls; he can feel the shape of her smile, imprinted against his temple. 

*

_(‘Oh, Sherlock,’ Sebastian Wilkes slurred, pushing Sherlock up against the wall – two years older and two stone heavier, courtesy of the Cambridge University rugby team. ‘Sherlock, Sherlock, nobody’s **ever** going to love you, are they, buddy?’ The word came with saliva; Sherlock winced as it landed on his face. ‘Poor lonely, lonely, **lonely** Sherlock.’ _

_He sang the words to the sky, drunk with it, high with it, his hands fisted in Sherlock’s crumpling collar; his mates laughed and hooted behind him. With an extra shove into the wall to hammer it home, Sebastian stepped away with a wave over his shoulder._

_‘Night, Freak,’ he called cheerfully and wandered off drunkenly down the road with his group, leaving Sherlock to curl up outside the entrance to the library, his books_ _scattered around in the dirt)._

*

He brings her tea while she fiddles with the baby monitor; she takes it with a faint smile, comfortable in her chair and he drops down opposite into his own, watching her take a sip with an appreciative smack of the lips. Putting the mug side-by-side on her little table with the monitor, she turns her attention to Sherlock; leaning forwards, she perches on the edge of her seat, reaches for him, her fingers carefully tracing the outline of his face. 

‘Okay?’ she checks; Sherlock can only nod. In his Mind Palace, the corridors that lead to Rosie's wing feel strangely decluttered now, a rockpile of thoughts that was gathering up against the wall finally fallen, _something_ clicking back into place by the simple surety of Jon’s touch. He has already taken the words, Rosie’s words, said to him and for him, and put them in a frame, placed them reverently up on a wall of her wing, stood back to admire his handiwork. _Evidence,_ boldly and brightly proclaimed, that what he’s been doing, he’s been doingwell.

‘She _loves_ you,’ Jon tells him, a declaration, firm and final. ‘So much.’ Her eyes are as wide and as steady as the rest of her, dancing merrily from the flickers of the fire as she leans forward to graze a gentle kiss against his cheek; rubs his chin briefly with her finger before she drops her hand to rest on top of his, and leaves it.

*


End file.
